“No, it won’t add to the attractiveness of the neighborhood, perhaps,” said Mrs. Clyde thoughtfully. “But how convenient it will be!”

Mr. Clyde had come home with the news that a drug-store was to be opened shortly on the adjacent corner. Shifting his position to dodge a foliage-piercing shaft of sunlight—they were all sitting out on the shady lawn, in the cool of a September afternoon—Dr. Strong shook his head.

“Too convenient, altogether,” he observed.

“How’s that?” queried Mr. Clyde. “A drugstore is like a gun in Texas: you may not need it often, but when you do need it, you need it like blazes.”

“True enough. But most people over-patronize the drug-store.”

“Not this family; at least, since our house-doctor came to keep us well on the Chinese plan,” said Mrs. Clyde gracefully.

But Dr. Strong only looked rueful. “Your Chinese doctor has to plead guilty to negligence of what has been going on under his very nose.”

“Oh, not more trouble!” pleaded Mrs. Clyde. She had come through the dreaded ordeal of little Betty’s operation for adenoids—which had proved to be, after all, so slight and comparatively painless—with a greatly augmented respect for and trust in Dr. Strong; but her nerves still quivered.

“Nothing to trouble you,” the doctor assured her, “but enough to make me feel guilty—and stupid. Have you noticed any change in Manny, lately?”

“Manny” was fourteen-year-old Maynard Clyde, the oldest of the children; a high school lad, tall, lathy, athletic, and good-tempered.

“The boy is as nervous as a witch,” put in Grandma Sharpless. “I’ve noticed it since early summer.”

“Then I wish you had taught me my trade,” said Dr. Strong. “Manny is so husky and active that I’ve hardly given him a thought.”

“Well, what’s wrong with him?” asked the father anxiously.

“Too much drug-store,” was the prompt reply. “Not drugs!” cried Mrs. Clyde, horrified. “That child!”

“Well, no; not in the sense you mean it. Wait; there he is now. Manny!” he called, raising his voice. “Come over here a minute, will you?” The boy ambled over, and dropped down on the grass. He was brown, thin, and hard-trained; but there was a nervous pucker between his eyes, which his father noted for the first time. “What’s this? A meeting of the Board? Anything for the Committee on Milk Supply to do?” he asked.

“Not at present,” answered Dr. Strong, “except to answer a question or two. You don’t drink coffee, do you?”

“Of course not. I’m trying for shortstop on the junior nine, you know.”

“How are you making out?”

“Rotten!” said the boy despondently. “I don’t seem to have any grip on myself this year. Sort o’ get the rattles.”

“Hm-m-m. Feel pretty thirsty after the practice, and usually stop in at the soda-fountain for some of those patent soft drinks advertised to be harmless but stimulating, don’t you?”

“Yes,” said the boy, surprised.

“Ah,” said the doctor carelessly; “three or four glasses a day, I suppose?”

Manny thought a moment. “All of that,” he said.

“Well, you quit it,” advised the doctor, “if you want to make the ball team. It will put you off your game worse than tea or coffee. Tell the athletic instructor I said so, will you?”

“Sure!” said the boy. “I didn’t know there was any harm in it.”

As Manny walked away, Dr. Strong turned to

Mr. Clyde. “I found out about Manny by accident. No wonder the boy is nervous. He’s been drinking that stuff like water, with no thought of what’s in it.”

“What is in it?” said Mrs. Clyde.

“Caffeine, generally. The most widely used of the lot is a mixture of fruit syrups doctored up with that drug. There’s as much nerve-excitation in a glass of it—yes, and more—than in a cup of strong coffee. What would you think of a fourteen-year-old boy who drank five cups of strong coffee every day?”

“I’d think his parents were fools,” declared Grandma Sharpless bluntly.

“Or his physician,” suggested Dr. Strong. “I’ve seen cases of people drinking twenty to twenty-five glasses of that ‘harmless’ stuff every day. Of course, they were on the road to nervous smash-up. But the craving for it was established and they hadn’t the nerve to stop.”

“The soda-fountain as a public peril,” said Mr. Clyde, with a smile.

“There’s more in that than can be smiled away,” retorted the doctor vigorously. “What between nerve-foods that are simply disguised ‘bracers,’ and dangerous, heart-depressing dopes, like bromo-seltzer, the soda-fountain does its share of damage in the community.”

“What about soda-water; that is innocent, isn’t it?” asked Mrs. Clyde.

“Yes. If the syrups are pure, soda-water is a good thing in moderation. So are the mineral waters. But there is this to be said about soda-water and candy, particularly the latter—”

“I’ve always said,” broke in Grandma Sharpless, “that candy-eating would ruin any digestion.”, “Then you’ve always been wrong, ma’am,” said Dr. Strong. “Candy, well and honestly made, is excellent food at the proper time. The trouble is, both with candy and with the heavy, rich soda-waters, that people are continually filling up with them between meals. Now the stomach is a machine with a great amount of work to do, and is entitled to some consideration. Clyde, what would happen to the machines in your factory, if you didn’t give them proper intervals of rest?”

“They’d be very short-lived,” said Mr. Clyde. “There’s a curious thing about machinery which everybody knows but nobody understands: running a machine twenty-four hours a day for one week gives it harder wear than running it twelve hours a day for a month. It needs a regular rest.”

“So with the machinery of digestion,” said the doctor. “The stomach and intestines have their hard work after meals. How are they to rest up, if an odd lot of candy or a slab of rich ice-cream soda come sliding down between whiles to be attended to? Eat your candy at the end of a meal, if you want it. It’s a good desert. But whatever you eat, give your digestion a fair chance.”

“You can digest anything if you use Thingumbob Pills,” observed Mr. Clyde sardonically. “The newspapers say so.”

“That’s the kind of doctrine that makes dyspeptics,” returned Dr. Strong. “The American stomach is the worst-abused organ in creation. Saliva is the true digestive. If people would take time to chew properly, half the dyspepsia-pill fakers would go out of business. If they’d take time to exercise properly, the other half would disappear.”

“Liver pills were my regular dependence a few years ago,” remarked Mr. Clyde. “Since I took up hand-ball I haven’t needed them. But I suppose that half the business men in town think they couldn’t live without drugging themselves two or three times a week.”

“Undoubtedly. Tell the average American any sort of a lie in print, about his digestion, and he’ll swallow it whole, together with the drug which the lie is intended to sell. Look at the Cascaret advertising. Its tendency is to induce, not an occasional recourse to Cascarets, but a steady use of them. Any man foolish enough to follow the advice of the advertisements would form a Cascaret habit and bring his digestion into a state of slavery. That sort of appeal has probably ruined more digestions and spoiled more tempers than any devil-dogma ever put into type.”

“Castor-oil is good enough for me,” said Grandma Sharpless emphatically.

“It’s good enough for anybody—that is to say, bad enough and nasty enough so that there isn’t much danger of its being abused. But these infernal sugar-coated candy cathartics get a hold on a man’s intestinal organization so that it can’t do its work without ‘em, and, Lord knows, it can’t stand their stimulus indefinitely. Then along comes appendicitis.”

“But some of the laxative medicines advertise to prevent appendicitis,” said Mrs. Clyde.

Dr. Strong’s face was very grim. “Yes, they advertise. Commercial travelers, because of their irregular habits, are great pill-guzzlers as a class. Appendicitis is a very common complaint among them. A Pittsburgh surgeon with a large practice among traveling men has kept records, and he believes that more than fifty per cent of the appendicitis cases he treats are caused by the ‘liver-pill’ and ‘steady-cathartic’ habit. He explains his theory in this way. The man begins taking the laxative to correct his bad habits of life. Little by little he increases his dose, as the digestive mechanism grows less responsive to the stimulus, until presently an overdose sets his intestines churning around with a violence never intended by nature. Then, under this abnormal peristalsis, as it is called, the appendix becomes infected, and there’s nothing for it but the surgeon’s knife.”

“Would you have people run to the doctor and pay two dollars every time their stomach got a little out of kilter?” asked Mrs. Sharpless shrewdly.

“Run to the doctor; run to the minister; run to the plumber; run anywhere so long as you run far enough and fast enough,” answered Dr. Strong with a smile. “A mile a day at a good clip, or three miles of brisk walking would be the beginning of a readjustment. Less food more slowly eaten and no strong liquors would complete the cure in nine cases out of ten. The tenth case needs the doctor; not the newspaper-and-drug-store pill.”

“But all patent medicines aren’t bad, are they?” asked Mrs. Clyde. “Some have very good testimonials.”

“Bought or wheedled. Any medicine which claims to cure is a fraud and a swindle.”

“Don’t tell me, young man!” said Grandma Sharpless. “You doctors are prejudiced against patent medicines, but we old folks have used ‘em long enough to know which are good and which are bad. Now I don’t claim but what the Indian herb remedies and the ‘ready reliefs’ and that lot are frauds. But my family was brought up on teething powders and soothing syrups.”

“Then you’re fortunate,” said Dr. Strong sternly, “that none of them has turned out to be an opium fiend.”

The instant he said it, he saw, with sharp regret, that his shaft had sped true to the mark. The clear, dark red of a hale old age faded from Grandma Sharpless’s cheeks. Mr. Clyde shot a quick glance of warning at him.

“And speaking of Indian remedies,” went on the doctor glibly, “I remember as a boy—”

“Stop a minute,” said Grandma Sharpless steadily. “The truth isn’t going to hurt me. Or, if it does hurt, maybe it’s right it should. I had a younger brother who died in a sanitarium for drug-habit when he was twenty-four. As a child he pretty nearly lived on soothing syrups; had to have them all the time, because he was such a nervous little fellow; always having earache and stomach-ache, until he was eight or nine years old. Then he got better and became a strong, active boy, and a robust man. After his college course he went to Philadelphia, and was doing well when he contracted the morphine habit—how or why, we never knew. It killed him in three years. Do you think—is it possible that the soothing syrups—I’ve heard they have morphine in them—had anything to do with his ruin?”

“Why, Mrs. Sharpless,” said the other, very gently, “I can only put it before you in this way. Here is one of the most subtle and enslaving of all drugs, morphine. It is fed to a child, in the plastic and formative years of life, regularly. What surer way could there be of planting the seeds of drug-habit? Suppose, for illustration, we substitute alcohol, which is far less dangerous. If you gave a child, from the time of his second year to his eighth, let us say, two or three drinks of whiskey every day, and that child, when grown up, developed into a drunkard, would you think it strange?”

“I’d think it strange if he didn’t.”

“Apply the same logic to opium, or its derivative, morphine. There are a dozen preparations regularly used for children, containing opium, or morphine, such as Mrs. Winslow’s ‘Soothing Syrup,’ and Kopp’s ‘Baby Friend.’ This is well known, and it is also a recognized fact that the morphine and opium habit is steadily increasing in this country. Isn’t it reasonable to infer a connection between the two? Further, some of the highest authorities believe that the use of these drugs in childhood predisposes to the drink habit also, later in life. The nerves are unsettled; they are habituated to a morbid craving, and, at a later period, that craving is liable to return in a changed manifestation.”

“But a drug-store can’t sell opium or morphine except on prescription, can it?” asked Mr. Clyde.

“It can in a patent medicine,” replied the doctor. “That’s one of the ugly phases of the drug business. Yet it’s possible to find honest people who believe in these dopes and even give testimonials to them.”

“Some testimonials are hard to believe,” said Mrs. Clyde, thankfully accepting the chance to shift the conversation to a less painful phase of the topic. “Old Mrs. Dibble in our church is convinced that she owes her health to Hall’s Catarrh Cure.” Dr. Strong smiled sardonically. “That’s the nostrum which offers one hundred dollars reward for any case it can’t cure; and when a disgusted dupe tried to get the one hundred dollars, they said he hadn’t given their remedy a sufficient trial: he’d taken only twenty-odd bottles. So your friend thinks that a useless mixture of alcohol and iodide of potassium fixed her, does she?”

“Why shouldn’t she? She had a case of catarrh. She took three bottles of the medicine, and her catarrh is all gone.”

“All right. Let’s extend her line of reasoning to some other cases. While old Mr. Barker, around on Halsey Street, was very ill with pneumonia last month, he fell out of bed and broke his arm.”

“In two places,” said Mrs. Sharpless. “I saw him walking up the street yesterday, all trussed up like a chicken.”

“Quite recovered from pneumonia, however. Then there was little Mrs. Bowles: she had typhoid, you remember, and at the height of the fever a strange cat got into the room and frightened her into hysterics.”

“But she got well,” said Mrs. Clyde. “They’re up in the woods now.”

“Exactly. Moral (according to Mrs. Dibble’s experience with Hall’s Catarrh Cure): for pneumonia, try a broken arm; in case of typhoid, set a cat on the patient.”

Mr. Clyde laughed. “I see,” he said. “People get well in spite of these patent medicines, rather than by virtue of them. Post hoc, non propter hoc, as our lawyer friends say.”

“You’ve got it. The human body keeps up a sort of drug-store of its own. As soon as disease fastens on it, it goes to work in a subtle and mysterious way, manufacturing a cure for that disease. If it’s diphtheria, the body produces antitoxin, and we give it more to help it on. If it’s jaundice, it produces a special quality of gastric juices to correct the evil conditions. In the vast majority of attacks, the body drives out the disease by its own efforts; yet, if the patient chances to have been idiot enough to take some quack ‘cure’ the credit goes to that medicine.”

“Or to the doctor, if it’s a doctor’s case,” suggested Grandma Sharpless, with a twinkle of malice.

“Show me a doctor who boasts ‘I can cure you,’ whether by word of mouth or in print, and I’ll show you a quack,” returned the other warmly.

“But what is a doctor for in a sick-room, if not to cure?” asked Mrs. Clyde.

“What is a captain for on a ship?” countered Dr. Strong. “He can’t cure a storm, can he? But he can guide the vessel so that she can weather it. Well, our medical captains lose a good many commands; the storm is often too severe for human skill. But they save a good many, too, by skillful handling.”

“Then there is no such thing as an actual cure, in medicine?”

“Why, yes. In a sense there are several. Antitoxin may be called a cure for diphtheria. Quinine is, to some extent, a specific in malaria. And Ehrlich’s famous ‘606’ has been remarkably, though not unfailingly, successful in that terrible blood-plague, born of debauchery, which strikes the innocent through the guilty. All these remedies, however, come, not through the quack and the drug-store, but through the physician and the laboratory.”

“May not the patent medicines, also, help to guide the physical ship through the storm?” asked Mrs. Clyde, adopting the doctor’s simile.

“On to the rocks,” he replied quickly. “Look at the consumption cures. To many consumptives, alcohol is deadly. Yet a wretched concoction like Duffy’s Malt Whiskey, advertised to cure tuberculosis, flaunts its lies everywhere. And the law is powerless to check the suicidal course of the poor fools who believe and take it.”

“Why, I thought the Pure Food Law stopped all that,” said Mrs. Clyde innocently.

“The Pure Food Law! The life has been almost crushed out of it. Roosevelt whacked it over the head with his Referee Board, which granted immunity to the food poisoners, and afterward the Supreme Court and Wickersham treated it to a course of ‘legal interpretations,’ which generally signify a way to get around a good law.”

“But the patent medicines aren’t allowed to make false claims any more, as I understand it,” said Mr. Clyde.

“That applies only to the label on the bottle. So you’ll find that the words ‘alcohol,’ ‘opium,’ ‘acetanilid,’ ‘chloral,’ and other terms of poison, have sprouted forth there, in very small and inconspicuous type. But there’s a free field for the false promises on sign-boards, in the street-cars, in the newspapers, everywhere. Look in the next drug-store window you pass and you’ll see ‘sure cures’ exploited in terms that would make Ananias feel like an amateur.”

“You make out a pretty poor character for the druggists, as a class,” observed Mr. Clyde.

“Not at all. As a class, they’re a decent, self-respecting, honorable lot of men.”

“Then why do they stick to a bad trade?” asked Mrs. Clyde.

Dr. Strong got to his feet. “Let one of them answer,” he said. “Mr. Gormley, who runs the big store in the Arcade, usually passes here about this time, and I think I see him coming now.”

“They can talk all they like,” said Grandma Sharpless emphatically, as the doctor walked across to the front fence, “but I wouldn’t be without a bottle of cough syrup in the house.”

“Nor I without my headache tablets,” added Mrs. Clyde. “I’d have had to give up the bridge party yesterday but for them.”

Mr. Clyde shot a sharp glance, first, at his wife, then at her mother. “Well, I’d like to see the labels on your particular brands of medicine,” he remarked.

“There’s nothing bad in mine,” asserted Mrs. Clyde. “Mrs. Martin recommended them to me; she’s been taking them for years.”

At this point Dr. Strong returned, bringing with him a slim, elderly man, whose shrewd, wide eyes peered through a pair of gold-rimmed glasses.

“So you want me to give away the secrets of my trade,” he remarked good-humoredly, after the greetings. “Well, I don’t object to relieving my mind, once in a while. So shoot, and if I can’t dodge, I’ll yell.”

“Why do you deal in patent medicines if they’re so bad?” asked Grandma Sharpless bluntly. “Is there such a big profit in them?”

“No profit, worth speaking of,” replied Mr. Gormley. “Though you’ll note that I haven’t admitted they are bad—as yet.”

“The bulk of your trade is in that class of goods, isn’t it?” queried Mr. Clyde.

“Worse luck, it is. They’ve got us through their hold on the public. And they not only force us to be their agents, but they grind us down to the very smallest profit; sometimes less than the cost of doing business.”

“But you aren’t compelled to deal in their medicines,” objected Mr. Clyde.

“Practically I am. My really profitable trade is in filling prescriptions. There I can legitimately charge, not only for the drugs, but also for my special technical skill and knowledge. But in order to maintain my prescription trade I must keep people coming to my store. And they won’t come unless I carry what they demand in the way of patent medicines.”

“Then there is a legitimate demand for patent medicines?” said Mr. Clyde quickly.

“Legitimate? Hardly. It’s purely an inspired demand.”

“What makes it persist, then?”

“The newspapers. The patent-medicine advertisers fill the daily columns with their claims, and create a demand by the force of repeated falsehood. Do you know the universal formula for the cost of patent cures? Here it is: Drugs, 3 per cent; manufacturing plant, 7 per cent; printing ink, 90 per cent. It’s a sickening business. If I could afford it, I’d break loose like that fellow McConnell in Chicago and put a placard of warning in my show window. Here’s a copy of the one he displays in his drug-store.”

Taking a card from his pocket, Mr. Gormley held it up for the circle to read. The inscription was:—

“Please do not ask us what any old patent, medicine is worth, for you embarrass us, as our honest answer must be that it is worthless.

“If you mean to ask us at what price we sell it, that is an entirely different proposition. When sick, consult a good physician. It is the only proper course. And you will find it cheaper in the end than self-medication with worthless ‘patent’ nostrums.”

“Has that killed his trade in quackery?” asked Dr. Strong.

“Nothing can kill that. It has cut it down by half, though. It’s a peculiar and disheartening fact that the public will believe the paid lie of a newspaper advertisement and disregard the plain truth from an expert. And see here, Dr. Strong, when you doctors get together and roast the pharmaceutical trade, just remember that it’s really the newspapers and not the drug-stores that sell patent medicines.”

“Are all of them so bad?” asked Mrs. Clyde.

“All that claim to cure. They’re either frauds, appealing to the appetite by a stiff allowance of booze, like Swamp Root and Peruna, or disguised dopes,—opium, hasheesh or chloral,—masquerading as soothing syrups, cough medicines, and consumption cures; or artificial devices for giving yourself heart disease by the use of coal-tar chemicals in the headache powders and anti-pain pills.”

“Well, you can’t make me believe, Mr. Drug-man,” said Grandma Sharpless with a belligerent shake of her head, “that a patent medicine which keeps on being in demand for years, on its own merits, hasn’t something good in it.”

“No, ma’am, I can’t,” agreed the visitor. “I wouldn’t want to. There isn’t any such patent medicine.”

“There’s hundreds of ‘em,” contradicted the old lady, with the exaggeration of the disputant who finds the ground dropping away from underfoot.

“Not that sell on their own merits. Advertising and more advertising and still more advertising is all that does it. Let any one of them drop out of the newspapers and off the bill-boards, and the demand for it would be dead in a year.”

“Yet, as a student of business conditions,” said Mr. Clyde, “I’m inclined to side with Mrs. Sharpless and believe that any line of goods which has come down from yesterday to to-day must have some merit.”

The druggist took off his glasses, wiped them and waved them in the air, with a flourish.

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death,

he quoted sonorously. “We think ourselves heirs to the wisdom of the ages, without stopping to consider that we’re heirs to the foolishness, also. We’re gulled by the printed lie about Doan’s Kidney Pills, just as our fathers were by the cart-tail oratory of the itinerant quack who sold the ‘Wonderful Indian Secrets of Life’ at one dollar per bottle.”

“Well, I hesitate to admit it,” said Mrs. Clyde, with a little laugh, “but we always have a few of the old remedies about.”

“Suppose you name some of them over,” suggested the druggist.

“Usually I keep some One-Night Cough Cure in the house. That’s harmless, isn’t it?”

The druggist glanced at Dr. Strong, and they both grinned.

“It might be harmless,” said the druggist mildly, “if it didn’t contain both morphine and hasheesh.”

“Goodness!” said Mrs. Clyde, horrified. “How could one suppose—”

“By reading the label carefully,” interjected Dr. Strong. “Anything else?”

“Let me think. I’ve always considered Jayne’s Expectorant good for the children when they have a cold.”

“Tastes differ,” observed the druggist philosophically. “I wouldn’t consider opium good for my children inside or outside of any expectorant. Next!”

“But the names sound so innocent!” cried Mrs. Clyde. “I’m almost afraid to tell any more. But we always have Rexall Cholera Cure on hand.”

“Had much cholera in the house lately?” inquired the druggist, with an affectation of extreme interest.

“Of course it’s only for stomach-ache,” explained Mrs. Clyde. “It certainly does cure the pain.”

“Not cure,—drug it into unconsciousness,” amended Mr. Gormley. “The opium in it does that. Rather a heroic remedy, opium, for a little stomach-ache, don’t you think?”

“What have you got to say against Kohler’s One-Night Cough Cure that I always keep by me?” demanded Grandma Sharpless.

Mr. Gormley beamed on her in deprecatory good nature. “Who? Me? Gracious! I’ve got nothing to say against it worse than it says against itself, on its label. Morphine, chloroform, and hasheesh. What more is there to say?”

“How long has this house been full of assorted poisons?” asked Mr. Clyde suddenly of his wife.

“Now, Tom,” she protested. “I’ve always been careful about using them for the children. Personally, I never touch patent medicines.”

But at this her mother, smarting under their caller’s criticism of her cough syrup, turned on her.

“What do you call those headache tablets you take?”

“Those? They aren’t a patent medicine. They’re Anti-kamnia, a physician’s prescription.”

“Yes; a fine prescription they are!” said the druggist. “Did you ever read the Anti-kamnia booklet? For whole-souled, able-bodied, fore-and-aft, up-and-down stairs professional lying, it has got most of the patent medicines relegated to the infant class. Harmless, they say! I’ve seen a woman take two of those things and hardly get out of the door before they got in their fine work on her heart and over she went like a shot rabbit.”

“Not dead!”

“No; but it was touch and go with her.”

“What’s in that; opium, too?” asked Mr. Clyde.

“No; a coal-tar chemical which puts a clamp on the heart action. One or another of the coal-tar drugs is in all the headache powders. There’s a long list of deaths from them, not to mention cases of drug-habit.”

“Habit?” cried Mrs. Clyde. “Do you mean I’m in danger of not being able to get along without the tablets?”

“If you take them steadily you certainly are. If you take them occasionally, you’re only in danger of dropping dead one of these days.”

Mr. Clyde’s chin abruptly assumed a prominence which he seldom permitted it. “Well, that settles that,” he observed; and it was entirely unnecessary for any one present to ask any amplification of the remark. Mrs. Clyde looked at her mother for sympathy—and didn’t get any.

“Whenever I see a woman come into the shop,” continued the druggist, “with a whitey-blue complexion and little gray’ flabby wrinkles under her eyes, I know without asking what she wants. She’s a headache-powder fiend.”

“That queer look they have is from deterioration of the blood,” said Dr. Strong. “The acetanilid or acetphenetidin or whatever the coal-tar derivative may be, seems to kill the red corpuscles. In extreme cases of this I’ve seen blood the color of muddy water.”

“It certainly makes a fright of a woman. ‘Orangeine’ gets a lot of ‘em. You’ ve seen its advertisements in the street-cars. The owner of Orangeine, a Chicago man, got the habit himself: used fairly to live on the stuff, until pop! went his heart. He’s a living, or, rather a dead illustration of what his own dope will do.”

“But what are you to do for a splitting headache?” queried Mrs. Clyde, turning to Dr. Strong.

“I don’t know, unless I know what causes it,” said Dr. Strong. “Headache isn’t a disease. It’s a symptom, a danger signal. It’s the body’s way of crying for help. Drugs don’t cure a headache. They simply interrupt it.”

“What with the headache-powders breeding the drug habit, and the consumption cures and cough medicines making dope fiends, and the malt whiskey cures and Perunas furnishing quiet joy to the temperance trade, I sometimes wonder what we’re coming to,” remarked Mr. Gormley.

Mr. Clyde rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “But poor people who can’t afford a doctor have no recourse but to patent medicines,” said he.

“Can’t afford a doctor!” exclaimed Dr. Strong. “Why, don’t you know that nostrum-taking is the most expensive form of treatment? Did you ever happen to see A. B. Frost’s powerful cartoon called ‘Her Last Dollar’? A woman, thin, bent, and ravaged with disease, is buying, across the counter of a country store, a bottle of some kind of ‘sure cure,’ from the merchant, who serves her with a smile, half-pitying, half-cynical, while her two ragged children, with hunger and hope in their pinched faces, gaze wistfully at the food in the glass cases. There’s the whole tragedy of a wasted life in that picture. ‘Her Last Dollar!’ That’s what the patent medicine is after. A doctor at least tries to cure. But the patent medicine shark’s policy is to keep the sufferer buying as long as there is a dollar left to buy with. Why, a nostrum that advertises heavily has got to sell six bottles or seven to each victim before the cost of catching that victim is defrayed. After that, the profits. Since you’ve brought up the matter of expense, I’ll give you an instance from your own household, Clyde.”

“Here! What’s this?” cried Mr. Clyde, sitting up straight. “More patent dosing?”

“One of the servants,—Maggie, the nurse. I’ve got her whole medical history and she’s a prime example of the Dupe’s Progress. She’s run the gamut of fake cures.”

“Something must have been the matter with her to start her off, though,” said Mr. Clyde.

“That’s the joke—or would be if it weren’t pathetic. She started out by having headaches. Not knowing any better, she took headache-powders.”

“One for you, Myra,” remarked Mr. Clyde to his wife, in an aside.

“Bad heart action and difficulty in breathing—the natural result—scared her into the belief that she had heart trouble. Impetus was given to this notion by an advertisement which she found in a weekly, a religious weekly (God save the mark!), advising her not to drop dead of heart disease. To avoid this awful fate, which was illustrated by a sprightly sketch of a man falling flat on the sidewalk, she was earnestly implored to try Kinsman’s heart remedy. She did so, and, of course, got worse, since the ‘remedy’ was merely a swindle. About this time Maggie’s stomach began to ‘act up,’ partly from the medicines, partly from the original trouble which caused her headaches.”

“You haven’t told us what that was, Strong,” remarked Mr. Clyde.

“Later. Maggie now developed catarrh of the stomach, superinduced by reading one of old Dr. Hartman’s Peruna ads. She took seven bottles of Peruna, and it cheered her up quite a bit—temporarily and alcoholically.”

“Then it was that that I smelled on her breath. And I accused her of drinking,” said Mrs. Clyde remorsefully.

“So she had been; raw alcohol, flavored with a little caramel and doctored up with a few drugs. Toward the close of her Peruna career, her stomach became pretty sensitive. Also, as she wasn’t accustomed to strong liquor, her kidneys were affected somewhat. In her daily paper she read a clarion call from Dr. Kilmer of the Swamp Root swindle (the real Dr. Kilmer quit Swamp Root to become a cancer quack, by the way), which seemed to her to diagnose her case exactly. So she ‘tanked up’ some more on that brand of intoxicant. Since she was constantly drugging herself, the natural resistance of her body was weakened, and she got a bad cold. The cough scared her almost to death; or rather, the consumption cure advertisements which she took to reading did; and she spent a few dollars on the fake factory which turns out Dr. King’s New Discovery. This proving worthless, she switched to Piso’s Cure and added the hasheesh habit to alcoholism. By this time she had acquired a fine, typical case of patent-medicine dyspepsia. That idea never occurred to her, though. She next tried Dr. Miles’s Anti-Pain Pills (more acetanilid), and finally decided—having read some advertising literature on the subject—that she had cancer. And the reason she was leaving you, Mrs. Clyde, was that she had decided to go to a scoundrelly quack named Johnson who conducts a cancer institute in Kansas City, where he fleeces unfortunates out of their money on the pretense that he can cure cancer without the use of the knife.”

“Can’t you stop her?” asked Mrs. Clyde anxiously.

“Oh, I’ve stopped her! You’ll find the remains of her patent medicines in the ash-barrel. I flatter myself I’ve fixed her case.”

Grandma Sharpless gazed at him solemnly. “‘Any doctor who claims to cure is a quack.’ Quotation from Dr. Strong,” she said.

“Nearly had me there,” admitted he. “Fortunately I didn’t use the word ‘cure.’ It wasn’t a case of cure. It was a case of correcting a stupid, disastrous little blunder in mathematics.”

“Mathematics, eh?” repeated Mr. Clyde. “Have you reached the point where you treat disease by algebra, and triangulate a patient for an operation?”

“Not quite that. But poor Maggie suffered all her troubles solely through an error in figuring by an incompetent man. A year ago she had trouble with her eyes. Instead of going to a good oculist she went to one of these stores which offer examinations free, and take it out in the price of the glasses. The examination is worth just what free things usually are worth—or less. They sold her a pair of glasses for two dollars. The glasses were figured out some fifty degrees wrong, for her error of vision, which was very slight, anyway. The nervous strain caused by the effort of the eyes to accommodate themselves to the false glasses and, later, the accumulated mass of drugs with which she’s been insulting her insides, are all that’s the matter with Maggie.”

“That is, the glasses caused the headaches, and the patent medicines the stomach derangement,” said Mr. Clyde.

“And the general break up, though the glasses may have started both before the nostrums ever got in their evil work. Nowadays, the wise doctor, having an obscure stomach trouble to deal with, in the absence of other explanation, looks to the eyes. Eyestrain has a most potent and far-reaching influence on digestion. I know of one case of chronic dyspepsia, of a year’s standing, completely cured by a change of eyeglasses.”

“As a financial proposition,” said Mr. Gormley, “your nurse must have come out at the wrong end of the horn.”

“Decidedly,” confirmed the doctor. “She spent on patent medicines about forty dollars. The cancer quack would have got at least a hundred dollars out of her, not counting her railroad fare. Two hundred dollars would be a fair estimate of her little health-excursion among the quacks. Any good physician would have sent her to an oculist, who would have fitted proper glasses and saved all that expense and drugging. The entire bill for doctor, oculist, and glasses might have been twenty-five dollars. Yet they defend patent medicines on the ground that they’re the ‘poor man’s doctor.”

Mr. Gormley rose. “Poor man’s undertaker, rather,” he amended. “Well, having sufficiently blackguarded my own business, I think I’ll go. Here’s the whole thing summed up, as I see it. It pays to go to the doctor first and the druggist afterward; not to the druggist first and the doctor afterward.”

Dr. Strong walked over to the gate with him. On his return Mrs. Clyde remarked:

“What an interesting, thoughtful man. Are most druggists like that?”

“They’re not all philosophers of the trade, like Gormley,” said Dr. Strong, “but they have to be pretty intelligent before they can pass the Pharmaceutical Board in this state, and put out their colored lights.”

“I’ve often meant to ask what the green and red lights in front of a drug-store stand for,” said Mrs. Clyde. “What is their derivation?”

“Green is the official color of medical science,” explained the doctor. “The green flag, you know, indicates the hospital corps in war-time; and the degree of M.D. is signalized by a green hood in academic functions.”

“And the red globe on the other side of the store: what does that mean?”

“Danger,” replied Dr. Strong grimly.